 Thank you very much Graeme and thank you to members of the society for inviting me here tonight, I actually am really glad that it's on zoom because the weather outside is terrible at least it is here in Falkirk where I'm based so this is one of the advantages of zoom I suppose you don't actually have to go out and get wet. So my title then raising the dead constructing characters from the ancient Christian past. Another Prime Minister Tony Blair has written of his fascination for Pontius pilot and the agonizing choice he was faced with as governor of Judea. The intriguing thing about pilot, Blair claimed, is the degree to which he tried rather than the bad. He commands our moral attention, not because he was a bad man, but because he was so good man. One can imagine him agonizing, seeing that Jesus had done nothing wrong and wishing to release him just as easily. However, one can envisage pilots advisors telling him of the risks, warning him not to cause a riot or inflame Jewish opinion. It's possible to see pilots as the archetypal politician caught on the horns of an age old political dilemma. Should we do what appears principled or what is politically expedient. Tony Blair wrote this in 1996. After his invasion of Iraq, his words take on heightened relevance. As a politician, Blair instinctively identified with pilot, understanding the unbearable decision he was called on to make. The pull between head and heart principles or pragmatism and the terrible consequences of making the wrong choice. Despite the two millennia that separated them, and his dilemma could still strike a chord. A few years ago, I went to Israel, which in fame leader Jerry Adams to make a documentary about Jesus for Channel four. We spent a lot of time talking about characters in the Gospels. But what sticks in my memory most about that trip was Mr Adams's interpretation of Judas Iscariot. I had been merrily making my way through the various scholarly attempts to explain Judas's betrayal of his master. Was it for the money? Was it simply a case of greed? Was he disillusioned in some way? Had he hoped Jesus would pursue a more nationalistic agenda, perhaps taking up arms against the Roman overlords? Had he even been in league with Jesus, was his betrayal agreed between the two of them a plot to get us somehow to stand in front of the chief priests? But Jerry wasn't really listening. They got to him, he said. The chief priests, they had some power over him and made him do their bidding. The more I thought about it, the more I realized he had a point. Scholars commonly suggest that Judas may have been the only disciple of the Twelve from Judea in the south. All the others seem to be Northerners from Galilee. And maybe that made him or his family more vulnerable to chief priestly pressure or even intimidation. Maybe the temple aristocracy felt that they could threaten him more easily than the others. What seemed to be an intractable change of allegiance to biblical scholars seemed readily understandable and even likely to someone with Mr Adams background. Once again, as with Tony Blair, the biblical character resonated with Jerry Adams's life experience and spoke directly to him. Pilot and Judas. But the Gospels are full of many other vivid and memorable characters. We might also add King Herod ordering the death of the Bethlehem toddlers. Herod Antipas's dancing daughter. John the Baptist dressed in counts. Blind Bartimaeus calling to Jesus as he sits on his grubby cloak. The woman who creeps up to Jesus, hoping his touch will cure her hemorrhage. The sewer and his seed or the woman who anoints Jesus's head with an incredibly expensive jar of oil. Those of us who grew up in a Christian tradition will have heard these stories since our childhood encountering men in Western art and culture. Even when these characters are cut adrift from their biblical context, they still have a habit of appearing time and again in literature and films. The trope of the prodigal son who squanders his inheritance before returning home, who risks everything for the greatest treasure, or the protagonist who sacrifices their own for those of us. Whether we recognize them or not, these tropes are all part of our biblical heritage. And the characters are so in great surprise on the rare occasion when a biblical character accounts to find a divergent, even contradictory picture. Take a pilot, an unremarkable provincial governor, a Roman knight in charge of a third-rate backwater province. A trait that they offer is strikingly different, too. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, after pilot left Judea in 37 CE, takes a dim view of the Roman governor, accusing him of insensitivity towards the people's religious feelings, designs on the temple money, and a fondness for putting down uprisings with two firmer hand. But it's pilot's contemporary, Philo of Alexandria, whose description should give us most pause for thought. Philo tells of an incident where pilot golden shields in the Jerusalem Praetorium in honor of the emperor. The Jewish people, however, complained about the shields, presumably because they contained the full name of the emperor, including his status as son of God, an accolade that was problematic in the city. The Jewish leaders threatened to send an embassy to Augustus, at which point Philo contains the following aid, that if they really sent an embassy, they would bring accusations against the rest of his administration as well, diversifying in detail his venality, his violence, his threats, his assaults, his abusive behavior, his frequent executions of untried prisoners, and his endless savage ferocity. So, as he was a spiteful and angry person, he was in a serious dilemma. For he had neither the courage to remove what he had once set up, nor the desire to do anything which would please his subjects. More of a character assassination perhaps than a straightforward depiction. Of course, it would be a mistake to take either of these Jewish accounts entirely at face value. Neither had any particular reason to like their Roman overlords, and both need to be understood in the broader context of their author's rhetorical aims. Josephus wanted to show that the poem, to some extent, was due to incompetent Roman governors like Pius, by contrasting Pilate's wickedness, to shape and mould the facts in support of their arguments. But even so, the contrast between what Philo says of Pilate's in the passage on the slide, and the indecisive wavering governor of the gospels is quite striking. Of course, real human beings are complex and contradictory. It would be perfectly possible for Philo's monster to have had a trial that brought him up short. We might even speculate as to whether Pilate's reported brutality was, to some degree, an attempt to hide wickedness and indecisiveness. But somehow this doesn't quite seem to bridge the gap. To adapt to line from Pilate himself, where is truth in all of this? Who is closest to the real historical pilot? The gospels or Philo? Is it possible to find an answer at a distance of 2,000 years, and perhaps more importantly, does it even matter? Is a well-crafted story, in the end, better than an accurate one? When it comes to female characters, the problems are even more profound. Not only are women far less likely to turn up in the historical records, but now we have the added problem of a history of male interpretation that insists on dividing women into virgins or whores. Take Mary Maddalena, for example. The gospels tell us surprisingly little about Mary, much, much less than you might imagine. St Mark introduces her only at the end, where she stands at the cross alongside a group of other women who have followed Jesus from Galilee. She sees where Jesus is buried and comes back to the same place on the Sunday morning, thus becoming an important witness to the empty tomb. And this is her chief perhaps only role in Mark's gospel, and she's only there, really, because all of the men have run away by this stage. It's Luke who says Jesus exercised seven demons from her, and John, who describes her vision of the resurrected Jesus early on the Sunday morning, where she mistakes him for the gardener. But that's all there is. There's nothing here to suggest that she's anything other than a thoroughly respectable female follower of Jesus. It was only much, much later in the sixth century that male interpreters amalgamated a range of gospel women into Mary. Part of the difficulty here is that as you may have noticed, almost half of the women in the gospel story are called Mary, which just sort of encourages people to mix them up. So we have the woman who anoints Jesus with precious perfume, who is also called Mary in John's gospel, and the unnamed sinful woman from the city in Luke. And all of these women are melded together to create the composite Magdalene, who featured so heavily in the preaching of Pope Gregory the Great, who was the first one really to promote the idea of Mary Magdalene, the prostitute. What else could a sinful woman be a prostitute? And how else to explain the seven demons, except as we came the great example of penitence and conversion in the earlier medieval church, a representation of the restraint of what womanly lust and a symbol of Jesus's forgiveness and compassion. She's one of the most painted biblical figures in medieval art, patron saint of women, reformed prostitutes, apothecaries and hairdressers. And her afterlife continues the edition of the Gnostic Gospels, where she's now said to be Jesus's companion, until she reaches her starring role in Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, now cast as Jesus's wife. If the penitent Magdalene spoke to the medieval church, it's the Magdalene as Jesus's other half that captures popular imagination today. In an age where chastity seems unnatural and when people are only too ready to believe in ecclesiastical cover-ups and conspiracy theories, Mary, the overlooked and disparaged wife of Jesus, takes on a new appeal and resonates with a different audience. In actual fact, modern scholars suspect that much of Mary's historical importance lay in a rather different direction. The fact that the Gospels mention any female disciples at all is significant. And the fact that all the Gospels mention Mary Magdalene, even when they differ quite a lot as to the names of other women, is surely noteworthy. These tiny echoes are probably part of a much fuller story of Mary Magdalene as the leader of a mission to winning. In effect, a counterpart to Peter. In a patriarchal age, when male missionaries would have found it difficult, if not impossible, to meet with a woman and speak to her unchaperoned, a parallel woman's mission would have been vital. Mary and other female missionaries would have been able to go homes to talk to them as they wash their clothes in the river and share stories as they fetched water. They would be able to baptize women, touching them, anointing them with oil, and healing them in exactly the same way as the men said to have done. The prevalence of missionary couples in the early church, such as Prisker and Aquila, who are known to us both from the Book of Acts and also Paul's Letters, lends force to this suggestion by acting as pairs, women and men together could spread the word much more unforcefully than male missionaries alone. The fact that people don't seem to have picked up on this significance until quite recently, I think, speaks volumes of the Androcentric way in which early Christianity has generally been reconstructed. But what of Jesus, the most significant gospel character. If the problem with female followers is that we have no little information that we have to fill in the gaps ourselves, the opposite is true when it comes to Jesus. Now we have to be too much information, too many stories of his activities and accounts of his teaching. The apostle Paul famously has little to say about Jesus, other than the fact that he was crucified and a handful of other small notes. But this is more than made up for canonical gospels and a mass of other later ones, generally known as apocryphal or non canonical gospels. All of these we see Jesus as a prophetic teacher, one who teaches with great authority and who has miraculous powers and one who's generally regarded by his supporters as being anointed by God to teach the coming of God's kingdom. Someone too who ultimately fell foul of both the Jewish and Roman authorities of his day and who ended up on a Roman cross. Given Jesus's lowly provincial status, it's hardly surprising that virtually everything we know about him comes from supporters, second and third generation Christians, who took it upon themselves to tell the story they inherited. Romans, at least the elite Romans who tended to leave written records only really became interested in Jesus, when the movement he founded started to become a nuisance. In the early second century, Tacitus and Pliny the Younger mentioned him briefly in the context of localized Christian persecutions. Somewhat earlier though, the Jewish historian Josephus included a whole paragraph on Jesus. Though modern scholars are convinced that what we now have has been edited by Christian copyists. The underlying phrases on the slide here were doubtless inserted by copyists whose piety wouldn't allow them to write out the passage without making their views known. Probably they wrote their pious assertions and the margins of the text from where in time they became absorbed into the main body. So we have a look at what Josephus says, around this time lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed it's right to call him a man, for he was a worker of amazing deeds and was a teacher of people who accept the truth with pleasure. He won over both many Jews and many Greeks. He was a messiah pilot when he heard him accused by the leading men among us, condemned him to the cross, but those who had first loved him did not cease. For on the third day he appeared to them alive again, because the divine prophets had prophesied these and myriad other things about him. To this day the tribe of Christians named after him has not disappeared. Josephus was a phariseic Jew to his dying day and couldn't possibly have written the account as it now stands. But the paragraph appears as part of a series of tumults that broke out in Judea at about the same time. As nothing now is true, it seems highly likely to me that an original account of some kind of a tumult has been quietly dropped. Perhaps Josephus's version of the incident in a temple where Jesus overturned the tables of the moneylenders. The only thing that we know of from the gospel record that could conceivably be considered as a tumult. Needless to say perhaps I would give an awful lot of money to have a copy of the actual version that Josephus wrote to have an account of Jesus from a Jewish near contemporary would be priceless. But as it stands in its bare bones, what we have here generally supports the gospel picture. Over the past decades, there's been a whole industry devoted to reconstructing the historical Jesus. In the interests of full disclosure, I should admit that it's something I've been involved with to as Graham has already said. I've now written two books on the historical Jesus, though the second the one that Graham held up was significantly shorter than the first. There was absolutely to do with publishers word limits. The second was designed to be a very brief history. But it also had to do with my own sense of unease with the whole enterprise. When it comes to uncovering the historical Jesus, the scholarly method is largely to compare events in the four gospels and to decide which seems most likely to be historical. The historical gospel is generally thought to be the earliest, probably from the early 70s CE, and that mark is the source for Matthew Luke and quite probably john. This means that in practice, the portrait of the historical Jesus that scholars come up with tends to be very much like the Jesus of Mark. The question becomes, how reliable is Mark? And how far was he actually interested in factual reporting? In the early 20th century, biblical scholars got very excited by comparative work on oral traditions. Looking very epic and Nordic sagas, they imagined that stories about Jesus floated about the early church. They were taking shape as fixed units. Various Christian missionaries, they argued, had their own stock of such oral units and passed them on in their teaching. And at some point, the evangelists wrote these oral units down, inserting them into their accounts like beads on a string. The principles responsible for the gospels were considered not to be literary men at all, but writers and editors, their own work limited to only the linking sentences and the arrangements of the units. In this view, the gospels, in effect, give us access to oral tradition as it existed in the church around the time that the gospels were written in the late 1st century CE. I'm caricaturing a little, of course, though not as much as you might hope. This view of gospel origins was hugely popular in the interwar years and has proved remarkably resilient. It is still held in various modified forms by many scholars today. And if you hold the view that the gospels are essentially collections of older oral material, then traditional historical Jesus work makes sense. It is essential to compare unit, to work out which is the older form, and to try to peel back layers and accretions, so that you expose the very earliest version. My problem with all of this, and the reason why my books on Jesus keep getting shorter, is that I no longer believe that that's how the gospels came into being. So first I want to consider very briefly here, oral tradition, memory, and the gospels as literary artifacts. So first then, oral tradition. Recent work on oral tradition has exposed its fluidity rather than its fixed nature. The advantage of oral storytelling is that every occasion can be different, precise needs of an audience and their situation. Writing oral stories down freezes them entice, and they quickly begin to lose their relevance, forever reaching out to a situation that has long since passed. Closely connected with this are modern studies of memory. On an individual level, memory is hardly the to recall that members tend to think quite the opposite. Anyone who has ever sat down with another person and try to recall the details of will realize that memory is fragile prone to distortion and unstable. We can easily forget who was there, or when an event took place. We have a tendency to roll two or more events together into the same one, and are highly influenced by other people's accounts. We're much better at remembering the gist of what happened, rather than the thousands of inconsequential detail cup real life. We can do everything through our own individual perspective. Far from being a mental video that we can play back, memory is patchy, biased and hazy. Moreover, we shouldn't underestimate the importance of the present on our recollection of the past. The past has no meaning to us, it clearly does, but we only remember things because they are of use or significance to us in the present. And past memories are quite unconsciously updated so that they retain their relevance, or else they're simply forgotten. As the shared story has had more to do with shared values and building a sense of community and identity in the present than with establishing the factuality of past events. Great biblical themes such as the Exodus from Egypt tap into a powerful sense of group identity and a shared past, irrespective of whether the book of Exodus could be shown to be factually accurate or not. Think about the story of the zealots last stand on Masada, killing themselves rather than surrendering to the heavens. Modern scholars are highly skeptical as to whether this actually took place, even whether there were any zealots at all on Masada, but the myth is still a powerful one in Israeli culture. Similarly, allegiance to the idea you covenant made by the God of Israel through the death and residence was the cultural memory that bound the earliest Christians irrespective of the details of the story. The evangelists, of course, shared this overarching cultural memory of other stories, many perhaps originating as real life memories, but suffering from the vagaries of recall, as they were told and retold to ever changing audiences. And third case, it's become increasingly clear to scholars that, contrary to the older view that I outlined earlier, the Gospels are indeed literary and logical products. Each Gospel has its own distinctive view of Jesus and the meaning of his mission, and each display their own set of themes, motifs and premises. Even when they are working with a source, each one rewrites it in his own way. A material is selected and shaped throughout in accordance with each evangelist's literary, theological and pastoral purposes. An effect each Gospel is a reception of the Jesus story, as its author takes from the swirling diversity of tradition and creates his own new path through it. Each reception is intimately connected. Each retelling of the story is at the same time an interpretation, a new way of thinking about it in a new situation. And all of this means that taking the Gospel texts, peeling back the layers to reveal a measure of authentic material is doomed to failure. In the end, all we have are the texts and the historical situation that they illumine most clearly is that of their late first century audience, with their unique set of circumstances, anxieties and hopes. The current scholarly consensus is that the Gospels are ancient biographies. And my own work has recently focused on thinking about the implications of this. What difference does it make to say that the Gospels are biographies rather than any other kind of literature? The Gospels stand as part of a long tradition of Greek lives of philosophers, stretching all the way back to Socrates. While Romans prefer to write about the daring deeds of staples and kings, Greeks wrote about thinkers or teachers. All, however, were particularly concerned with virtue, or sometimes vice. Rather like Victorian biographies, ancient ones held up a hero's virtues and life to public scrutiny and encouraged the audience to imitate pre Freud. There was very little attention to person only occasionally as a vice to avoid it. Biographies of philosophers or teachers allowed new audiences to get close to them. To hear them again and to become disciples, in effect, raising them from the dead, so that they could influence a new generation of followers. Central to biography was the idea of. Constructing a life from words alone is not an easy thing to be a fictionalization was allowed, even necessary. A biographer often needed to add extra details to make up inner thoughts, even to alter the sequence of events more fully to bring out the hero's character. And this, of course, is not just confined to ancient biography. Most modern biographers who reflect on their craft suggests similar things. Biography differs from history, and that it isn't always the big events that best show character. It's not always the battles one or the speeches made that show you what a person is really like. But the little things, the small exchanges, the way people treat their children or slaves, the way they dress, their attitude to money. These are things that give insight into what they're really like. And that brings me back to stories. Building blocks of biography are stories or anecdotes, a little scene of vignette that perfectly illustrates someone's character. The Greek word for them is a well-known literary unit, which forms the heart of the Greek and Roman education system. Young boys and occasionally girls were set passages which they were supposed to rewrite as little crea, little anecdotes. And the tiny paragraphs in the Gospels are not then units of formerly floating oral tradition, but carefully crafted anecdotes. Stories that bring home their message. Like other biographies, the Gospels string them together, but each can be read and pondered on its own merit. Each one creates its own little world with its own central actors and events. And each provides a momentary insight into the central actor's character for good or ill. So thinking about anecdotes, a great deal lately. Two close colleagues sadly passed away recently and it fell to me to write obituaries. Like biography, obituary relies to a great extent on the anecdotes. We love recalling the time when Professor So-and-So missed the train to Glasgow and what he said to the station manager, or when the college dean got lost on Buchanan Street and had to be helped out of phrases. Well-known characters attract anecdotes. Winston Churchill, of course, is famous for the amount of anecdotes and pissy sayings that are connected to him, whether accurately or not. But what struck me particularly as I was writing these obituaries was the fact that some of the most memorable anecdotes in each case were very unlikely to have actually happened, or if they did happen, they'd been seriously enlarged in the telling. And yet, at a very deep level, they conveyed an untruthful sense of the colleague's character. Apocryphal stories, we might call them, but should an obituary writer refrain from including stories that she suspects are apocryphal, or judge them by different standards of truth? It seems to me that gospel writers were in a similar position. Many of the stories that they inherited and reshaped to fit their biographies probably had some link at some level with factual events. But much more important was the desire to expose Jesus' character and way of life to uncover his soul. Some stories are relatively unproblematic. Jesus' disputes with opponents, for example, is welcome to children and inclusive teaching. Others are all told to present Jesus in a positive light as a kind and gracious teacher, always able to get the better of opponents, and an example for the audience to follow. But others might strike us today as more problematic. Stories of Jesus stealing the storm or walking on the water, for example, may or may not have happened. But the point is that they show Jesus as one who possesses the power of God over nature. They tell us who these early followers deeply believed Jesus to be, rather than necessarily offering a factual account of what he did. And of course, nobody before the 18th century had our modern day assumption that if something didn't actually happen, it wasn't true. Ancient people were quite well aware of the distinction between fact and fiction, whether something happened or whether it didn't. The differ from us is in supposing that the proper vehicles, the truth, were myth, poetry, and above all, story. So we perhaps shouldn't be too surprised if characters in the Gospel in the endangering history. The anecdotes crafted by the evangelists present us with timeless, actively held ideas, hopes and anxieties. With their all to human struggle, it will continue to fascinate audiences, always with surroundings, and still having something vital to say. Whatever their historical counterparts, these literary characters are continually raised again and set free as people encounter them again and again in the Gospel stories and beyond. Thank you. We predicted the first question between ourselves correctly. No surprise. And that is, and what evidence is there that Pontius Pilate was born in Fortin Gaul in Perthia? Oh, lots. No, very, very little. And I mean, the Romans weren't really kind of up here quite as early as Pilate needed to be born. As far as I understand it, there was a stone with PP on it, and that seems to have been enough. But what's really interesting about these traditions, I think, is that it's not only Fortin Gaul that's associated with Pilate. So there's traditions that he's from Germany and from Spain. There's even a lake in Switzerland, next to a mountain, which is called Mount Pilatus, and supposedly Pilate's bones, Pilate's body was put in the lake. So I always find it really interesting to sort of speculate on why people sort of wanted to associate with Pilate. Was it them who said, they themselves who said, you know, Pilate came from our place or was it opponents who said, you guys are so bad, Pontius Pilate was one of you. And there's also different traditions about Pilate. In the western parts of the Roman Empire, he was seen as a baton. In the eastern part, he was even made into a saint in the Ethiopic church. So even opinion on Pilate was actually quite diverse in the early church. So Pilate actually has a very lively afterlife, popping up in all sorts of places, not least Fortin Gaul. Yes, so he probably couldn't have played rugby for Scotland in that case. I don't think so. There's a question here about the, I think, to go together. One is, how much has the nuance of language with translation through several languages affected the Bible stories we have today? Because you gave the example of Josephus and how you could see how translation had inserted things. And the question is asking whether there's more of that type of changing as the story goes through different languages. Yeah, I mean that's always a really interesting question. I think it was something like Josephus because our earliest versions of Josephus come from the 11th century. We're actually really, really late, you know, there's over a thousand years of this text being copied and transmitted that we just don't have access to. In the case of the Gospels, we've actually got some very early texts. We've got papyrus from second, third century. So we can go back quite early with the Gospels. They're all obviously written in Greek, but there are all sorts of variant forms in these early texts. And there are places where it's not certain what the real text actually says. And what I mentioned with Josephus actually happens quite often too that as Christians are copying these texts out in sort of scriptoriums in monasteries, quite often people put little comments in the margin and then gradually these marginal comments get put into the text itself. So sometimes you'll see in Bibles bits that are sort of in brackets and that's perhaps because not all versions have that. So certainly the process of transmission, I think, is a difficult one. And we are talking 2000 years, you know, it's a long time to be transmitting texts, most of the time just done by hand by scribes and scholars. And then of course, the whole thing about translation into English, I mean, there's so many different translations and variations. And I suppose people choose whatever one they most like, you know, whatever style they like there. But, but again, you know, I think modern translations are trying to kind of get a modern way of reading the text and the more modern and accessible the text is then again I think the more we can sort of resonate with these characters. There's a question here about whether, as part of the oral tradition, was there any musical ballad tradition which complements the written record. Well, that's an amazing question. Why not? I mean, I would imagine so. I mean, you know, people are singing hymns at Passover and a lot of, you know, I showed that rather romantic picture of sort of a campfire and people sitting around it sharing stories. I'm sure there would have been singing and early Christians as Jews would have would have sung the Psalms, but they might well have sung their own, their own hymns, their own stories. There's quite a few bits and pieces in Paul's letters that are thought to be perhaps part of a sort of an early hymn or some kind of poetic thing. I don't have any, any insight into that. I mean, we do know that the early Christians sung hymns, but we don't really know very much about the content of those hymns. Is there any evidence that the Gospels were incorporating older stories which predate the Christ story? There are people who have found references to Romulus or Socrates and things like that in some of the Gospels. I mean, Luke's Gospel gives Jesus a much more sort of noble death than Mark's. So, so I think there is some sort of pilfering from from other stories. And of course, I mean that the whole sort of vast repertoire of Jewish stories. There's lots of nods here and there in the Gospels to the stories of Moses and Abraham and the Exodus. And these are all sort of motifs that keep coming into the Jesus story. I mean, for example, when Jesus feeds the 5000, there's really, really clear links there with Moses and the manna in the wilderness. There's also links with Elisha who fed 20 soldiers and still had stuff left over at the end. There's links there with the Eucharist to conceal these different kind of things that have kind of come into the story there. So the writers are working in this whole sort of contextual framework where they're bringing them all in and they're sort of swirling them all around and nodding to various traditions as they go. You mentioned Luke and there's a question here. How did Luke find out about Jesus? Did he use an oral tradition and people's memories before arranging things into his story? I wish I knew. Yeah, I mean, Luke is really interesting because he gives us a prologue. I mean, it's not a very long prologue. It's not as long as most of his Roman contemporaries who would have given a very long introduction to their work and told us all about why they were the best person to be writing this work. But he does say, he says that lots of other people have tried writing accounts, which probably refers to at least Marx Gospel because he seems to use Mark as the basis for his own account. And it does seem to suggest that he knows of other accounts, perhaps other written accounts, probably he's got other oral stories. I mean, people at the time would have, I think, tried to seek out people who'd perhaps known Jesus or known people who'd known Jesus. And I think he would probably have been quite diligent about trying to find out information, but that's not necessarily because he wants to be historical and factual, although perhaps he does to some extent. But all of these stories, I think there's a lot of writing them up in the manner that suits what Luke wants to say. I think Luke is very keen on this idea of Jesus as the as a person going to the oppressed and the marginalized and that's sort of the big theme that that he keeps going back to throughout his gospel. I think I anticipated a question about Luke as a as a forensic investigator before he put pen to the paper. But there's another question here about, are we from Tony Burton, are we able through archaeological research to find anything more about the stories in the Old Testament? And can I add a writer to that, because when you go to, you know, what's called the Holy Land that you're surrounded by places that are very familiar in terms of what's supposed to have happened there. At the same time, you're aware that that, you know, the church of the Nativity and the Holy Sepulchre are probably not the bath and the crucifixion took place in your travels. Have you come to places where you think, gosh, this is really where something did happen. I think it's really difficult and obviously the whole tourist industry is based on showing you the very places where these things happened. The difficulty, especially in places like Jerusalem, is that it was more or less flattened twice. Once by the Romans in 70 AD, and then again in 135 by Hadrian, it was completely flattened and they drove a massive big road through it and excluded Jews from the city. So I think a lot of those memories would have been lost. I mean, it's possible that some of the places remain. And certainly, I mean, you know, we can, we can look at the site of Herod's Palace, we can look at the place where Pontius Pilate stayed out in the coast in Caesarea. Sorry, I was so thrilled today. I've identified some of these places linked with some of the major characters, but I think it's very difficult to say anything about people like Jesus who really didn't leave much record in the archaeological record. Is there anything in the contemporary Roman literature? I mean, you mentioned Tacitus, but are there other things that sort of cross tabulate with what the Gospels are saying? I think you've gone mute, Helen. Helen, I think you're mute. Ah, that's right. Sorry, I was getting a signal that said you're not able to unmute yourself. Yeah. It was a question about whether there were contemporary texts from the Romans in addition to Tacitus that provide support for what the Gospels are saying. No, and this is what leads to, you know, things on the internet about Jesus being a myth and Jesus never existed and apparently there was a survey and a huge proportion of people under 30. I think it's something like 40% of people under 30 were thinking that Jesus didn't exist. So I mean, it's absolutely quite amazing. And one of the reasons I think why this gains some traction is because there isn't much of Jesus from Roman authors. And I think as I tried to say in the talk, I think the reason for that is that elite Romans just aren't interested in somebody if Jesus is low status. They only become interested in Jesus when his followers start to become a problem. Tacitus talks about the followers of Jesus in the time of Nero and Nero of course had set fire to Rome and wanted scapegoats so he blamed the Christians. And at that stage clearly Christians were becoming a group of people that could be identified and Tacitus says that they were generally hated by the population. So Tacitus starts to take note of them at this point, because they have now sort of impacted on Roman history. But otherwise I think Romans aren't particularly interested in in Christians. There's a little bit in Pliny the Younger. He's writing to the Emperor Trajan and he says, I keep coming across these Christians. I don't know what to do with them. I've sort of had a chat with them and I tell them to curse Jesus and if they curse Jesus then that's fine but otherwise I kill them and Trajan writes back and says yes that's probably the best thing to do. Again, Pliny is becoming interested in them once there are problems in his province, but otherwise he's not interested in getting to the bottom of what Christianity is about. You know they're not interested in kind of the history of Christian origins at all. And how do the ancient texts of other religions compare in terms of historical accuracy? I suppose, I mean I suppose what's different about Christianity fundamentally different about Christianity than other religions is that Christianity is linked to this historical event. You know the incarnation, the idea that God became a person in one specific and that means that Christianity is always going to be to some extent a historical religion and there's always going to be historical questions I think just aren't. I mean the one I know most about is Judaism and and of course Jews have an allegiance to the story of Israel as it's laid out particularly in the first five books of the Old Testament. And there's a general fecal stories but because they're in such a kind of an ancient past I don't think people really would try to you know there's no way you could possibly try to establish whether they happened or whether they didn't. I mean there are archaeologists who go and dig up Jericho and then sort of offer opinions as to whether the walls fell down or not. But, but it's a different kind of history I mean it's not focused in one event in the same way that Christianity is so so in a way I think Christianity has much much more in terms of historical records than any other religion but on the other hand it also needs that it depends on that than any other faith. There's a, there's a, there's several questions in sort of theme, I just picked one of them, what room does this analysis lead for religious belief? Because it seems to be that there's a, I think it's, there are questions you're really asking about the jump from the historical record to the religious belief. Yeah, it's, I mean I find this a really interesting thing about, you know, fact and belief. As I said, it's only really from the 18th century that people thought things had to be true historically accurate for them to be true. I mean, poets have always known that, that things don't have to be historically accurate to be true. So, I think, I think one of the problems of Christianity today is that people have got so on this idea of, did it happen? Did Jesus exist? Who was Mary Magdalene? What are all, how do we account for these historical things? And they are interesting and I mean I would see myself as a historian and I really, you know, like to try and find out what we can about about all of these characters and events. But in the end, I do think that all we have are the Gospel texts and what the Gospel texts are trying to do is to instill belief in people. I don't think the Gospel writers wrote expecting that people were going to start pulling them apart and asking historical questions about them. I think the right way to approach the Gospel texts is to read them as story and to allow the characters to kind of engage with you, to think about the characters and the situations they find themselves in and what it says about Jesus, you know, what is the story telling me? Rather than always asking, did it happen? The question here, why were so many women in the Bible called Mary? It's just a fact that there's a woman called Taliland who's done a lot of work on grave inscriptions and she's put them all together in a huge catalogue, every single inscription to do with a woman that we have from 1st century Judea and something like a third of women are called Mary. Another large group are called Salome, which again is a name we know from the New Testament, and the rest of women are a variety of other names, Joanna, Susanna, that kind of thing. So clearly Mary was really, really popular. It's a kind of a Greek version of Miriam, Miriam or Mariammi is the Jewish version, and Mariammi was Herod the first favourite wife, she was a Hasmonean princess, so she had sort of more noble Jewish blood through her, so clearly because of her prominence, I think that's probably why so many girls were called Mary, but you get the same thing with men too, this group of names that men are called, so Simon, John, these are very, very popular names, many nicknames in the Gospels too, so Mary Magdalene is probably Mary from Magdala, so she's identified according to where she's from, more often women are identified by their husband or their children or their father, depending on their age, but Simon is called Peter, and there's just a lot of nicknames, and I think you needed a nickname because otherwise you'd shout Mary and sort of half of the room would turn around. So you're one of the few academics whose work has been covered by the Sun newspaper, I think it was a documentary that you made, and it was to do with the possibility of female disciples, and I forget when that was made as a programme, but how have you got on with that line of arguing? It's not that novel, I mean we had one or two documentary, we went to some caves and things like that, that hadn't been looked at too much, but just the general idea that Jesus had female disciples is pretty well accepted by Biblical scholars nowadays, there's no big kind of controversy there. I mean the Gospels kind of make a big deal of the 12 disciples, the 12 male disciples, but 12 tribes of Israel, and so what Jesus is doing sort of symbolically walking around with 12 men is saying this is a Jewish renewable movement, 12 men representing the 12 tribes of Israel, and so I think their 12, their 12-ness is important, but then after the death of Jesus the 12 just kind of disappear, and I've never seen again, 12 is not important in church history, 12 men, but it's very clear that Jesus also had female disciples too, I mean people like Mary Magdalene, and Mark says at the crucifixion that there were a group of women who'd followed him from Galilee, so suddenly you get this completely different, women have been walking around with Jesus and the 12 throughout the whole of his ministry, so I don't think it's disputed nowadays as well as the 12. It's interesting that a lot of the monasteries in Bethlehem were founded by women, not contemporary, and often they were described as rich women, often Roman. What was the attraction of Christianity to rich Roman women? It's strange. In the second century, an opponent of Christianity called Celsters said that Christians of low life beggars, women, meaning really uneducated people, silly people, stupid people, like women, at least said that probably shows that there's some basis, I mean clearly he's being hugely disparaging, but I don't think he could have said that if women were really hardly ever seen. So there does seem to have been some kind of attraction of Christianity to women, but also Luke makes a big thing of sort of rich women, women benefactors, and I mean, again, that might have been something that the women were quite interested in. A lot of people in the ancient world seem to have been interested in Judaism and sort of went to synagogues were interested in the idea of the one God and Jewish ethics, but sort of stopped short of joining the movement, whereas with Christianity perhaps some of the same people who were attracted to Judaism may have become Christians, and that does seem to be the sort of tradition of women benefactors. I mean stretching up right up until Constantine's mother of course who went on the trips around the Holy Land looking for bits of the true cross and the founding monasteries and things there. Yeah. We're running out of questions a bit you seem to be skeptical about the events at Masada but doesn't the Roman ramps still extant they approve that there was a seeds and that the Jews may well have committed suicide. Yes, yes I mean absolutely something happened there and I mean it and it is an amazing sight if anybody's been there and you know that the typical thing is to go up before sunrise and to watch the sun sunrise coming up there and from the air you can see exactly where the Roman camps were. The reasons why scholars generally are skeptical about it is that as far as we can tell there was no sign of of zealots or if fighters there, the people who have been refugees. And so that doesn't mean that in Josephus has it but but the most scholars and this is something that I haven't looked at particularly myself but just from whatever people have said is that the evidence there on the ground doesn't seem to support to support this this reading. Again, I mean I think it doesn't matter I mean the point is the story is such a powerful one. But it's, you know, particularly in Israeli culture and it's for a long time the Israeli special forces were sworn in at Masada and you know it's got such a powerful cultural meaning to it. Providence would you put on the crown of thorns in Notre Dame Cathedral, which were fascinating BBC documentary just a couple of weeks ago about the fire and the reconstruction but one of the main stories was was rescuing the crown of the thorns the nail from the cross. And I think there was something else in the safe. So this is a general relic questions. Are there any, are there any well, I guess the answer is that there aren't well verified relics, despite their ubiquity. No, and I'll have to look for that documentary actually because I like a good relic. I mean, I think all of these relics, you know they start to appear, I mean they start to appear relatively early, but obviously in the medieval period that's when they're really going. And I mean I think I think it's very easy for us to be quite scathing off them and, and again I think we've got this hang up about wasn't the real hand for crown of thorns, and if it wasn't the real crown of thorns then we're just not interested in it. And again, I think that's the wrong way to think about it. And the point is that, that this, this thing whatever it is is creates a kind of a space for people to think about what it meant for Jesus to be wearing this crown of thorns what what sort of torture was involved in that and it's, it's a moment to be able to reflect on that. I mean I don't, I don't for one minute think that that is the real crown of thorns I doubt that anybody and the criteria or any of the young people later on and kept the crown of thorns but but again it's what it signifies that's important. There's a great sequence in this documentary where a fireman comes out of the blaze carrying the crown of thorns in his arms only to be told by the archivist it's the wrong crown of thorns the real ones are in a safe. And then they then they go hunting for this day, and they forget the combination key for the safe. So it's like a well worth watching. I have to say that that that was my first I heard that the, that Notre Dame was on fire I mean after I'd heard that there weren't any people killed my first reaction was, did they get the crown of thorns because I mean although I don't think it is. I feel I think a really holy relic and I think there is something you know I think it Protestant Church has kind of missed somebody by not by not having relics by not having pictures by not having things that sort of help you to think about the stories and the people involved in this. I think we've been Q&A for half an hour and although it's 10 minutes before nine I think we can let you off the hot seat now Helen and thank you very much for being up for that rapid fire series of questions.